AI-driven Factors Influencing the Retail Sector

By Retail CIO Outlook | Wednesday, December 05, 2018

Major technology companies are stepping up and investing in AI-driven applications due to its capability in solving complex tasks. However, there is a fear that AI can take over the place of the human race—but its impact on present technological aspects and prediction system cannot be underestimated. Selection of appropriate and accurate AI techniques helps in enhancing the business productivity, boosting top and bottom line value, along with achieving desired output with high accuracy and efficiency.

AI-based chatbots are often used in retail sectors to ease customer service and retail processes. Day-by-day, AI capabilities are getting closer to giving the complete human touch, majorly influencing areas driven by intuition, retail merchandise, and inventory planning. Compared to the other sectors, AI adoption in retail is initiated with a sluggish start. But processing towards the new era of online shopping and revised technological portfolios has led retailers to deploy AI for effective decision making and to capture sophisticated insights about base business decisions. Moreover, in the competitive marketplace, certain critical insights with respect to business perspective will be hidden, and are likely to be missed from the human eye, mainly at a global scale. Deploying AI has opened new avenues for the invention with critical insights, and it will disrupt the existing retail ways in the near future.

Expanding customer experience by providing a wide range of products with its better price tag helps to build a better customer-seller relationship. AI-powered virtual response system with profound domain-specific knowledge and automated personalization allows customers to obtain the best products with better cost, which indirectly impacts in enhancing the customer-seller relationship.

Though efficiency and competitive advantage are related to the throughput of the system, there is a lot of difference between their individual performances. If a work can be completed ten times faster than the average rate, there may arise questions on whether other companies are following the same procedure. If not, the AI-driven company has spent more in the business, giving rise to a competitive advantage.